I posed this question to my LinkedIn network:

What is the most improvisational (resourceful/agile/engaging) organization or individual you know, and how has this benefited them?

The most compelling response came from Jesse Silver, a visual effects artist who’s a friend of mine:

EMAIL #1

My candidate would be my nephew, Nate. After an A+ academic training, which included the Wharton School Of Business, he stepped away from the rarified world of international finance to pursue his love, baseball. Not as a player exactly, but as one of the most recognized authorities in the world on fantasy baseball. He’s a published author, writes a newspaper column, and is a partner in an online fantasy baseball site, which uses programming that he created to figure the various odds and combinations.

He’s also a professional poker player, and he does pretty well with that as well. After all, he’s an expert at figuring the odds!

I caught Nate on The Colbert Report this week, and sent sent Jesse an email saying how glad I was to see a gamechanger like his nephew getting some pub.

Jess wrote back:

EMAIL #2

Have you checked out his election forecasting site? it’s called fivethirtyeight.com. This is another of those improv stories. Nate’s dad (my bro) is the Chair of the department of Political Science at Michigan State, so I guess Nate got his interest in politics from his dad. Anyway, Nate decided to test his factoring software to see if it would function as well forecasting primary results as it did predicting the outcome of a game between the 1927 Yankees and the 1959 Dodgers. Nate started publishing his forecasts under a pseudonym, and his forecasts were more accurate than most of the pollsters. One of his baseball fans recognized the nickname and revealed who was making the forecasts. The attention was immediate with an profile in News Week, followed by mentions in TIME and other media. He was interviewd by Dan Rather and was asked to join his reporting team on election night. He’s also been interviewed by Keith Oberman. The interest in his work keeps on growing. Not bad for a kid who started out collecting baseball cards!

I have seen a lot of people in business spend a lot of time and waste a lot of money in quest of The Big Idea (aka The Killer App, The Market Maker, The Home Run). This process can become a highly subjective, ego-charged exercise. A gamechanger like Nate Silver knows that breakthroughs are often the synthesis of two existing concepts (that may be seemingly unrelated, e.g. baseball stats and politics).

In business, as in baseball, two doubles can result in a better situation for your team than a home run.

I wrote to Uncle Jesse saying I intended to blog about Nate on the GameChangers site, and also asked him what he thought about the prospects for a TRON2:

He responded:

EMAIL #3

Even Wonkette has mentioned Nate in her blog as every nerd girl’s “secret boyfriend”, so now poor Nate is in the hipster world’s gunsights. I told his dad that he’s going to be getting an avalanche of propositions…

As for TRON2, I’ve seen the pirated video of the teaser screening at Comicon and I think that the look is great. I hope that it’s done well, something different and NOT a remake. Digital Domain is rumored to be doing the effects. The whole TRON phonomenon is a bit of a surprise for me. At the time of its release, we all thought it was a failure, but it’s grown to cult status as the ancestor of CG. I look forward to seeing it when (and if) it comes out.

TRON is one of my favorite examples of how wealth gets generated in the Networked World. By combining two theretofore unrelated concepts–Hollywood feature filmmaking and computer graphics–TRON changed the CGI game, and a multi-billion dollar industry has risen on its back. Disney, which produced the original TRON, has subsequently realized more of the wealth generated by that industry (via its Pixar relationship/acquisition) than any other media company. By an Industrial Age definition, (e.g. the bottom line) Jesse’s right, TRON was a failure. As defined by the Networked World (e.g. a productive game), TRON may have struck out at the boxoffice when it was originally released, but it has been a big hitter ever since.

Tags: , Digital Domain, election forecasting, fivethirtyeight.com, Jesse Silver, Nate Silver, The Colbert Report, TRON, TRON2, Wonkette

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Character, Creativity, Education, Entrepreneurship, Games, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.